


day undone

by ZucchiniBread



Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: BAMF May Parker (Spider-Man), Gen, Mj knows, Tony Stark Has A Heart, forcing fictional characters to live through my life experiences to feel valid, infinity who?, ned is my fav but hes not a big part of the story im sorry, peter parker says fuck, she just knows, they support peter, very little superheroing, weird dialogue format
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-22 11:26:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18135062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZucchiniBread/pseuds/ZucchiniBread
Summary: He applies to NYU, MIT, Columbia. Those are the ones he tells everyone about, but he saves money for the admissions fees, and sends out two more he doesn’t tell anyone about, to Queensborough Community, and to Pratt.





	day undone

When Peter hits senior year, he waits until the week before New Year’s to frantically submit his applications. There’s no shortage of recommendation letters - Mr. Harrington, Principal Morita, all his teachers are willing to write him letters. And Tony, too, who doesn’t even ask, just puts his letter into the hands of every admissions committee of every college in the northeast (Peter finds out about this much much later, but is not surprised whatsoever). He applies to NYU, MIT, Columbia. Those are the ones he tells everyone about, but he saves money for the admissions fees and sends out two more he doesn’t tell anyone about, to Queensborough Community, and to Pratt.

 

He sends out the applications at the last possible minute and forgets about them as best as he can. When March rolls around, he stops looking at the mail. He brings it in, drops it on the counter, and works on homework until May gets home and goes through it herself.

 

Tony badgers him. Absolutely badgers. He dodges the questions.

 

He ignores what’s looming in the distance, and trudges through school. He and Ned start a group chat with everyone in their biochem class, and it dings constantly, people begging for notes at 4 in the morning. He always thought he’d get a job in junior or senior year, but he’s struggling to keep his head above water (and if he has Karen run through the material with him while he sits on the ledge of a building, well, that counts as studying).

 

And he goes through on the weekends and gives himself a day to be calm. He brings Ned up on the roofs with him and takes portraits because the neon lights on the signs make fantastic lighting.

 

It’s April and Aunt May has been tearing through the mail looking for the acceptance letters, _they should be in by now, you haven’t seen them?_  Peter dodges the question, says he’ll keep an eye out. He’s been accepted into Columbia, at least, with a fair deal of the cost waived, but he doesn’t talk about that one because he knows he’s not going there anyway. Queensborough accepts him immediately. That letter (and email) came at the beginning of March, and it lingers at the back of his mind.

 

MIT welcomes him into their department of chemical engineering in the first week of April, and four more years, _minimum_ of chemistry makes his stomach swoop. He sends the picture of a crying cat to the group chat without context and goes out as Spider-Man. He has to turn in a lab report tomorrow, but he gets home late, and can’t concentrate on the words, so he goes to bed, sets his alarm for 3:30, 3:35, 3:40, 3:45, and falls into bed, planning on just doing it after a nap, just a nap, but he lays down and closes his eyes, and thinks about four years until he falls asleep at 3:04.

 

He sleeps through his alarms, and May wanders in his room at six thirty, having just woken up, to find him fast asleep with his phone blaring next to his bed. He wakes to her shaking him, ripping the quilt back, and he makes a confused noise, and her voice filters in, asking if he’s hurt, her hands pressing into his ribs gently, running her hands over his head, looking for wounds. He takes a second to get his bearing, sits up, _I’m fine what its fuck lab I didn’t finish my lab report fuck,_ and May shuts his alarms off, and pushes him back down onto the bed. He shakes his head, and May shuts the lamp, _you can skip today, you have two months left, one late grade isn’t going to hurt you_. And he wants to say no, but he says yes because his eyes burn and he feels so so heavy, and he’s asleep a minute later.

 

He wakes up at 2:30 with afternoon light filtering through the window. The blinds interrupt it, and there’s dust floating on the air, and he knows that dust is just skin and pollen and dirt, but he grabs his phone and takes a photo of it anyway.

 

He sees he’s got missed texts from Ned, who, like May, assumed he was deathly injured to have not shown up to school. He tells Ned he just overslept and made a day of it, then gets up, opens all the windows, straightens the pillows on the couch, refolds the blanket on the chair, does the dishes, fixes a pot of coffee, and settles down at the table. He opens his lab notebook and stares at it. It shouldn’t take more than two hours to finish the lab, and he’ll get his makeup work tomorrow, but he can’t start. He tries but he can’t.

 

He gets up, pours himself some coffee, and opens his phone. There are 23 new messages in the group chat, which he ignores, and sends a message to the other group chat, with just Ned and MJ, to ask if they want to get food later. They both say they have too much work, and they agree to meet up for lunch over the weekend. He tries again, shoots off a message to Tony, who says he’s free and that _I want to hear all the updates about schools_ , and Peter types out a message that says, nevermind, that says reschedule, but deletes it, and types out _can we not talk about school?_ And Peter watches for the response, grimacing for the _why, what’s wrong, let’s deal with this_ , and he can’t deal with it right now, but Tony just says _sure._ And then they’re together and they eat at the tower, and Tony says _wanna go to the lab_ , and Peter’s on the verge of saying no, but he nods, and they waste four hours in the lab and at the end Peter doesn’t feel burnt out, but he knows he has to do the lab report, and when he gets home, he catches up with May, and it’s still on the counter. They rewatch the first season of the Great British Bake Off, and it’s 11 and they both go to bed. Peter shoves the lab report, unfinished, into his bag, and decides to worry about it later.

 

MJ got her schedule. Already. She enrolled with early admission, she tells them, and she says she’s taking a college writing course that starts two weeks after graduation. Peter asks about her fall schedule, he doesn’t even know her major, and she says _I have anatomy and physiology, literature by women, figure drawing, intro to biomedical engineering._ Peter blinks. _What’s your major, those are all over the place_ , and she shrugs, says she’s undeclared and she’s taking a semester to look at college STEM programs, to see if she’d continue, but she wants to double major in studio art and literature. He asks what she would do if she really liked college STEM _, well, I would do that then, I’m not going to pay 7,000 dollars a semester to be miserable for four years_ , and he tells her, before Ned, who has an internship at a pharmaceutical company lined up for the summer, before May, who got her nursing degree early and who is looking at medical school, before Tony Graduated-From-MIT-Before-I-Turned-Twenty Stark. Peter says, like it’s a dirty secret, _I applied to Pratt for photography_ , and she goes _ok_  like its not a big deal, and he says he’s worried what people will think, for going through a STEM school for years only to get a degree in photography, and she says, incredulously, _you’d rather spend the rest of your life working in a field you can’t stand than deal with people who think your life is any of their business? Not to use effeminization as an insult, but that’s a pussy move, Parker_. And he’s almost insulted, but she pulls out her phone and shows him her art portfolio.

 

It’s mid-April, and his aunt wants answers. (So does Tony, but he doesn’t press the issue after Peter asks him not to). But May wants to know if he’s gotten any letters in, and he says, _yes_ , and she goes, _are they good letters_ , and he says, _I got accepted to everywhere so far_ , and she goes, _that’s not what I asked_ , and he loves her so much and he starts to cry because he’s frustrated and confused, and he can’t deal with that without crying, and he says _, I don’t know what I want to do,_ and she says, _tell me everything you’re thinking_ , and he spills it all for her, every place he applied, Pratt, and MJ who is very excited about her figure drawing class, and the lab report he never finished, and the ones he half-assed since then, and the tests he has coming up that he can barely think about, and how everything after graduation doesn’t feel like it’s real.

 

She listens, and when he’s done speaking, and he’s looking at the ground with watery eyes, she holds his hand and says, _you don’t need it all figured out at seventeen. Nobody has it figured out at seventeen._ And Peter shakes his head, says Ned knows, and Tony knew and _you knew_ and May shakes her head _I never knew I’d be in New York, thought I’d be in physical therapy, Tony at seventeen was in college and knew what he was majoring in. He didn’t know he’d be Iron Man, didn’t know that he’d pass his company onto Pepper and spend his days creating metal battle armor. Ned doesn’t know either. Even if he knows what he wants to do, where will he be in ten years?_ Peter gets her point, but to be difficult, he says, _pioneering the world of medicine_ , and May laughs _I’m glad you believe in him so much, and he might end up doing that, or he might decide to go to med school and be a small town pediatrician, or he might get tired of STEM and be a filmmaker, or to open his own business and play guitar at the farmer’s market on the weekends._ Peter smiles. _He doesn’t know how to play guitar_.

 

_Yet,_ May says, _not yet, but no one knows exactly where they’ll be in ten years, and_ she sighs _what I’m trying to say is if you try to force yourself to be what you think you need to be, it won’t end up well._ Peter thinks about this for a moment, and nods, and says thank you _love you_ , that he’ll deal with it all later. She says, _you can tell me anything, you know?_ And he nods and they go to bed.

 

It’s the first of May, and he’s put down his deposit for the fall semester. Tony is across the lab, positively vibrating with curiosity, but not saying anything, and Peter appreciates the space, but goes into his backpack and pulls out the photos he sent to Pratt with his application and lays them down on the workbench. Tony looks over at them, looks at Peter, and nods down to the folder. Peter slides it over to him and watches his face carefully as he goes through the photos, one by one, lingering over one or two in particular. At the back of the folder is his acceptance letter, and Tony reads through the whole thing.

 

Peter bounces his leg, waiting for Tony to say anything, a feeble, _these are nice, what happened to STEM?_ would work, but Tony goes back to the beginning and looks at them again.

 

_What camera did you use on these?_ Peter blinks, then says, _I have an old Nikon I fixed up._ And Tony nods, like this makes total sense, and he points at one of the photos and says _this is from a while back?_ And Peter says _yeah how’d you know_ , and Tony tells him they tore down the building in the background a year back, says, _you’ve been working on this a while_ , and Peter nods and Tony flips back to the front of the portfolio and drags his fingers over the image. It’s a cat, laying in a patch of sun, the shadows lined up perfectly with the line on its legs where black fur turns into white paws. Peter sits, fidgets, then offers, _I had to put up like a curtain of webs to get the shadows to work on that_ , and Tony laughs.

 

_When did you get into this?_ And Peter says _with Midtown and everything it was all STEM and I just was burnt out on it._

 

_When did you get into photography, I asked_ , and Peter tells him he always has, and pulls up a photo from a shoot with Ben, one he’s still proud of, where Ben is laying on the couch and the window behind him is open and it’s dusk, and he’s asleep and the light is soft and dappled across the knickknacks in the apartment.

 

Tony smiles, soft, asks _why didn’t you put this one in?_ And Peter says, _because I like it too much._

 

_Can I have a copy of these_ , Tony holds up the portfolio, and Peter says sure, and pulls the old Nikon from his bag, and gets a photo of Tony when he’s not looking, the fluorescent lights of the lab sitting behind his head, silhouetting him, the shadows filling in the lines on his face, his eyes dark. At the sound, Tony looks up, demands to see it, _you have to delete it if I say so_ , but he likes the photo, says _send that to Pratt, it’ll get you a dorm with its own bathroom_ , and Peter says its only thirty minutes away, and Tony scoffs, _yeah if there’s no cars on the road_.

 

_I’m glad you’re sticking around_ , he says, and Peter nods, and says _I think I made the right choice._

**Author's Note:**

> this was written in part to kind of introduce peter's photography into the mcu, and partially for me to work out what im feeling about my own college right now - if you see any mistakes, let me know, whether they're spelling or characterization. i know the dialogue is a weird format, but i kind of wanted it to bleed into the writing, so i used the italics technique. love you bye bye


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